I was in my office working last Friday evening around midnight, when all of the sudden my phone rang. Late night phone calls are NEVER good…and on the other end of the phone was my mom…who had an overly-friendly brown bat zooming around her living room. My mom recently moved into our small town to be closer to our two daughters…so I walked over to her house in the middle of the night and promptly helped with a little “eviction.”

Unfortunately, I am becoming a bit of an expert at removing bats from residential buildings…as I have had to “evict” approximately ten bats out of our own home during the past five years. They seem to love our first floor and basement (thank goodness they’ve avoided our second floor, where all the bedrooms are), but I’ve been slowly having to give all those freeloaders the boot…as well as tighten-up all of the holes and cracks I can find in order to encourage them to find another home. I’m not surprised at all that bats took up residence in our house, as it had sat vacant for approximately eight months before we purchased and moved into the home…and was in DIRE need of repairs. Still, that doesn’t make my wife feel much better whenever one comes out to make an appearance…so I do my best to tell them to hit the road.

My wife (and now mom) will ask me “what can we do to get rid of them?,” so tonight I decided to do a little research on the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources web site. The DNR site actually had some great information on the brown bat species, but not much advice for removing them. Oh well…my quest for information on having a bat-free home continues…

While I was on that site though, I thought I might as well look at a few images to see what could be done from the standpoint of optimization. The results of that bit of effort can be viewed below: Read the rest of this entry »

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I didn’t want to write another posting about fantasy football so soon after posting a message on MyFantasyLeague.com several days ago. However, I received the following message from one of my league-mates tonight…and I couldn’t resist the opportunity:

“Draft last night- chaos. Trying to get onto the site tonight to declare keepers- impossible. We might want to set up a chat room alongside the live draft room if/when it crashes during the PSFFL draft.”

Such is life as a fantasy football player this time of year…when you have subscription and hosting services crashing left and right, after they failed to anticipate or accommodate for the volume of site traffic and bandwidth that they would be needing.

The league being referred to in this particular instance is hosted at Fanball.com. Fanball is a great service! However, they have been plagued with unnecessary and AVOIDABLE server crashes for portions of the past several years. Every Sunday afternoon, around 2-4pm Central Time, I assume that their servers will be unavailable when many of their customers are trying to access their league information and check on their scores.

I had contacted Fanball staff 2-3 years ago…showing them how a bit of image optimization work would go a LONG way towards reducing server load and crashes, but to no avail. Some examples of what can be done with the imagery on their site/service is as follows: Read the rest of this entry »

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I was doing some research tonight on Fresnel lenses for a pet science and eco-friendly idea I’ve been thinking about for the past few years, when I came across an interesting web site called Green Power Science. According to their web site: “Green Power Science is dedicated to the backyard scientist. Our belief is that some of the smartest people in the world discover the best things through trial and error IN THEIR OWN BACKYARDS OR GARAGES. We welcome all levels of creativity and hope you find the answers you are looking for.” Outstanding! If they ever do achieve their desire to have a show on the Discovery Network, I would be one of their loyal viewers…as I am a bit of a tinkerer and a fan/admirer of numerous smaller scientific experiments.

While I was in their site, I thought I might as well look at a few of the images found on their home page. Without further ado: Read the rest of this entry »

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I’ve been designing web pages since 1994…and in the 14 incredibly FAST years that have followed, I’ve come to discover one key thing about myself: I like it when stuff works…especially when stuff works WELL using as few moving-parts and/or resources as is humanly possible. Most of the web developers reading this blog could probably code circles around me in their core abilities, but I have always felt as though one thing I am better than most at doing is looking for opportunities to take existing imagery and code and to make it do the same job, only faster/better/cheaper.

This bit of self-discovery eventually morphed into what is now our GraphicsOptimization web site and blog. However, a CLOSE second in the passion department for this type of thing (for me) is code and script optimization. I speak fluent English, a decent amount of Spanish, and just a tiny bit of German and Japanese…but I always tell people that coding in HTML, JavaScript and CSS is my true “second language.” I absolutely love it…especially the ability to see if I can figure out ways of saying the same thing…only with a smaller “word count” (if you catch my drift).

I came across a great article tonight from Tony White at Smashing Magazine entitled “7 Principles Of Clean And Optimized CSS Code” and wanted to make sure and blog about it. One particular quote from the article resonated particularly well with the message that I try to convey related to image optimization too: “Optimization isn’t just minimizing file size — it’s also about being organized, clutter-free, and efficient.” Preach it, Brother Tony…

The straight-forward and common-sense approach to Tony’s assertions and tutorial is nice, in my opinion. He takes a topic that can be very technical or imposing in nature and conveys his message in a very non-threatening manner…exactly what is needed in order to help convince all of those amateur or part-time web developers out there to pay attention to these sorts of issues. Then, once people have realized the power in the results they’ve achieved from employing those techniques, they can dig deeper into the issue and ask the more detailed, technical questions. Read the rest of this entry »

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Okay, okay….not newsworthy in the world of image optimization! However, as I’ve eluded to in previous postings, I am a big supporter of Barack Obama in the 2008 United States Presidential election process, so this news is big to me. CNN, the Associated Press and MSNBC are all confirming the news, so I have to believe it is true.

CafePress sure hasn’t wasted any time in getting the Obama-Biden 2008 merchandise sales rolling, but I thought I would take a look at one of those designs included within their merchandise sales to see what might be done from an image optimization standpoint:

Unoptimized 480×480 pixel .jpg graphic - 41,600 bytes

Optimized 480×480 pixel .png graphic - 24,136 bytes

A quick conversion from .jpg to .png format using xat.com’s Image Optimizer, along with some subsequent “defrag” work in PNGSlim, reduced that image’s size by 42 percent. Quite a bit of improvement from only 1-2 minutes of effort.

I like Biden as Obama’s choice for Vice President! I think he compliments Obama in a lot of positive ways…and I think that he’ll help to make a good-many Independents (like me) or undecided voters feel more comfortable when casting their votes. But this is a graphics optimization blog…so I promise to try and keep my political musings to an absolute minimum.

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Have I mentioned yet in this blog how I absolutely LOVE the [uwebd] listserv? I was cruising through several of the postings there today when somebody rolled-out a reference to the Chivas Regal Effect in relation to recruiting students and trying to figure out methods for making each institutional dollar stretch just a LITTLE farther going forward. As a person with nearly eight years of undergraduate and graduate marketing classes under my belt, that really got my creative juices flowing…so much so that I just couldn’t resist sharing my own thoughts on the listserv.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term “Chivas Regal Effect,” it basically refers to the mindset that if something costs more, it must be more desirable. I used this very theory or “effect” to mapformation’s advantage in the recessionary economy following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on American soil and the subsequent recession which followed. We were struggling to attract new clients in the East Coast of the United States during that period, and in order to improve our performance, we RAISED our prices by approximately 30-40 percent. Corporate suicide, right? Wrong. We went from having few/no clients in several of the Atlantic Coastal states to having that region evolve into our largest source of revenue.

What does this have to do with optimization services? The more I have thought about this concept, the more I have begun to wonder if the reason why most web developers have yet to adopt many of the benefits associated with optimizing imagery is that, other than a few of the more-mainstream applications out there, the vast majority of the tools and techniques associated with image optimization are 100 percent FREE to download and utilize.

Could it be possible that, because many of the very-best tools out there are free of charge, there exists a perception that the resulting services or files must be flawed or “too good to be true?” If we, as an example, all of the sudden decided to double or triple the prices that we charge for helping organizations optimize their imagery (when they decide or elect not to do it themselves), would we immediately see a spike in interest from corporate or educational web developers out there as a result?

No worries, everyone! Our commitment to offering VERY low-cost and/or free optimization services to organizations will not be changing anytime soon! However, I am beginning to wonder if “easy” and “cheap/free” is equating to “no good” or “unnecessary” in people’s minds. If anyone reading this wanted to weigh-in with a comment or two on that particular idea, I would love to hear from you. In the interim, keep optimizing all those images out there…

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Back on March 23, 2008, I wrote a posting about Pngquant and 32-bit .png optimization, in effort to share information related to what one might do to optimize RGBA images (.png images using alpha transparency). I had decent results with that program, but I have recently stumbled across another program focusing on 32-bit .png optimization that I wanted to make sure and try.

That program is called pngnq, and touts itself as an improvement over Pngquant…essentially building a new and better median cut algorithm (with or without dithering) using Anthony Dekker’s neuquant algorithm.

The command-line program is supposed to work across a wide variety of platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux, etc.). However, I installed the program on my Windows Vista operating system tonight, and I have yet to get the program to work. It keeps generating a “missing .dll” error when I try to run the application.

I am anxious to try this program out to see if the results that are achieved are superior to Pngquant…so I’ll keep giving that program installation and functionality a try! In the interim, if anyone out there has any experience with pngnq and is willing to share your comments in this posting, I would greatly appreciate it.

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I recently received a comment on our site from Cleanblack.com on our Blackle Pages posting, so I thought it might be nice to give them a bit of exposure for what they are doing. Cleanblack was formed in direct response to the theory that setting Google’s search page background to black versus white could save as much as 750 Megawatt-hours of energy each year, a theory that was also discussed by Mark Ontkush on his ecoIron blog.

It’s a good theory! However, it is only partially true and effective, as was mentioned in our December 21, 2007 posting about color and energy consumption. CRT monitors handle color differently than LCD monitors related to power consumption, and with roughly 75% of monitors in use within developed nations in 2007 being LCD monitors, black page backgrounds actually consume MORE power to display than white page backgrounds. Translation? White page backgrounds will ultimately do a better job in conserving electricity on three-fourths of monitors in the developed world.

While looking at the Cleanback site, I thought I would quickly run two of the images on their home page through our optimization processes at GraphicsOptimization. The results of that experiment can be seen below: Read the rest of this entry »

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As a fan of professional football, this is an exciting time of the year for me. I love watching my Minnesota Vikings play every weekend, and in three short weeks, it’ll be the Vikings against the Green Bay Packers on Monday Night Football to open the season. It doesn’t get much better than that!

This time of year is also incredibly fun for another reason: fantasy football! Every Fall, millions of us Americans get to pretend we’re a professional football franchise head coach and general manager…trying to build the best, most competitive team possible and then hope our players perform well enough to earn us a little glory at the end of the season.

For fantasy football information and advice, one need look no further than Footballguys.com. However, for hosting one’s leagues (so that you don’t have to do all of the manual number-crunching that goes into league play), one of the best and most-popular services out there is MyFantasyLeague.com.

All but one of the leagues I play in uses MFL as its host, so I speak of their services with a great deal of personal experience! I have never experienced server crashes at MFL before, but other unnamed hosting services that I have used in the past have occasionally crashed during the weekend, when everyone is getting in their line-ups and checking their weekly scores. Why are those servers crashing a good portion of the time? You guessed it…BANDWIDTH. What can one do to reduce the amount of bandwidth their site/service is consuming? You guessed it again! Read the rest of this entry »

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You will be hard-pressed to find a bigger fan of the Portable Network Graphics (.png) file format than me…as it’s combination of more efficient file sizes, non-patented lossless data compression, alpha transparency support and the LONG list of optimization tools which have been developed to squeeze every extra byte out of images is second to none. However, for as good as .png is, it does have a few limitations.

.png images do not always achieve superior results to .gif when it comes to tiny images (<1 KB in size). The .png format also does not handle animation like it's .gif format counterpart...as the .mng (Multiple-Image Network Graphics) format that was supposed to be the replacement to the animated .gif file never really caught-on and garnered the support of many of the main-stream browsers. Probably the BIGGEST issue related to the use of the .png file format though relates to gamma.

Gamma correction controls the overall brightness of an image. Different monitors and/or computer systems use different gamma levels when displaying content. Wikipedia has a great page on its site which describes gamma correction in fine detail.

Henri Sivonen wrote an absolutely fantastic summary of the PNG gamma correction problem and how it relates to color matching imagery and CSS-colors recently, and summarizes the core of the problem/issue as follows:

“There is no way of making PNG images that match CSS colors in all PNG-supporting browsers. This reduces the usefulness of the otherwise excellent image format. If the image colors and the colors defined in a style sheet need to match, it is safer to use GIF or JPEG. If you want to use PNG and don’t care about older browser versions (pre-Tiger Safari in particular), the best course of action is removing all the color space information from the PNG files. If you only want a match with the background color, you could make the background a PNG image as well.”

Every “house” has a few “skeletons” in its closet. For the .png file format, this would be one of them. Do NOT, however, let this be a deterrence in using .png for just about any/all images that are not photography within your web sites! Unless you are trying to exactly match CSS colors, it should be a non-issue (or at least a very minor/tolerable one). Just one more thing for folks to be aware of though as they are choosing the ideal format(s) for storing imagery on their sites.

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